OJK – IMF – World Bank International Events: International Research Seminar

On October 14, 2018, Purnomo Yusgiantoro Center (PYC) attended the second day of OJK – IMF – World Bank International Events held in Ayana Resort and Spa, Bali. The second day of this event is an International Research Seminar which was opened by Wimboh Santoso, S.E., MSc., Ph.D. as the Chairman of the Board of Commissioners of Financial Service Authority (Otoritas Jasa Keuangan, OJK). The seminar consisted of four-panel discussion sessions covering (1) Digital Finance; (2) Financial Technology; (3) Sustainable Finance and (4) Financial Market and Institution.

During this event, PYC had the chance to listen to a presentation from Dr. Ulrich Volz on “Asia’s Green Finance Challenge.” Dr. Ulrich Volz is the head of Department of Economics at SOAS University of London, and in his presentation, he highlighted the need of large investment in renewable energy generation, energy efficiency, smart transportation networks, and many other areas that will help the shift towards sustainable patterns of production and consumption. He also mentioned that Asia already had several examples of the effort to align the financial system with sustainable development as well as examples of innovative financial products and services developed by the financial sector. However, there should also be priorities in de-bottlenecking the regulation problems in which could hamper the application of the various sustainable financial product in supporting the sustainable developments.

From the discussion, we can conclude that sustainable financing, for example through Green Bond, will provide an alternative for renewable energy financing in Indonesia. An increase in Green Bond issuers in the last years shows that it can be used as an effective financial product to support sustainable development. OJK already made huge progress in producing key regulations to support the implementation of sustainable finance products in Indonesia, and hopefully, it can help Indonesia in meeting the renewable energy target in 2025.